The Sanctuary Seeker (3 page)

For answer, the reeve bent down and grabbed the shoulders of the body, oblivious to the wave of stench that came up as he heaved it over onto its face.

‘There, on his back. We saw it when we carried him in.’ Bending closer, John saw a bloody stain diluted with rain, on the green tunic. In the centre was a small tear, narrow and just over an inch in length, sitting obliquely between the man’s shoulder-blades.

‘Have you looked here under his clothing?’ he boomed at the reeve.

Ralph shook his head. ‘Left it to you, sir, like we were told,’ he said obsequiously.

The coroner grabbed the lower hem of the tunic with a bony but powerful hand and pulled it up. It would come no further than waist level. ‘Gwyn, let’s get this up.’

The ginger giant moved around to the other side to raise the limp arms, as they wrestled away the tunic and pulled the undershirt up to the armpits. At least the early putrefaction had got rid of rigor mortis, which would have made the process even more difficult.

As Gwyn let fall the left hand of the corpse, he grunted again, his favourite form of communication.

‘His fingers … they’re cut.’ He picked up the hand and pulled back the curled fingers to expose the palm and finger pads. Between the thumb and first finger was a deep slash to the bone, and across the inside of the first joints of all the fingers, the flesh was cut to the tendons.

Even the squeamish Thomas de Peyne was intrigued.

‘How did he come by that?’ he squeaked.

‘Caught hold of a blade, trying to defend himself.

A knife or a sword,’ answered John shortly.

‘Perhaps the same blade that did this, then.’ Gwyn pointed to the now exposed back of the corpse, reddened and blotchy where the blood had settled under the skin as it lay on its back after death. Under the rip in the tunic and shirt, the surface of the body showed a clean-cut deep wound, an inch long, sharp at the lower end and blunt at the top. As they watched blood and gas blew slow bubbles out of the injury.

Without hesitation, the coroner poked his forefinger into the wound and pushed down until his knuckles were level with the skin. ‘A stab, deep inside him. Slashed his heart and lights, no doubt.’ There was a sucking sound as he withdrew his finger and wiped it clean on the hay that littered the floor of the barn.

Thomas the clerk retched and John looked round at him with a scowl.

‘If your stomach is to be turned by every little thing like this, a useless clerk you’ll be to me. Pull yourself together, man, or I’ll get rid of you, even if the Archdeacon is your uncle!’

Thomas gulped back his bile, crossed himself and nodded. Since his trouble with the girl novitiates in Winchester, he had had no employment and only the intercession of the Archdeacon of Exeter had persuaded Sir John to take him as his clerk.

The coroner rose to his feet and looked pensively down at the corpse.

‘It’s clear how he died. What we need to know is where and when he died … and who he is.’

Gwyn ran a hand through his tangled hair, which so often looked like a haystack after a gale. ‘Murdered, no doubt. Stabbed in the back, a coward’s act with dagger or short sword by the size of the wound.’

He never called his master anything, not ‘Crowner’, not ‘Sir John’. Yet he was utterly loyal without being servile, a Cornishman deferring to a man with Saxon, Norman and Celtic blood in his veins.

The coroner stood scowling down at the body.

‘Stabbed in the back, yes … But he had the chance to grab the blade with his left hand, maybe setting aside a second thrust.’

Gwyn nodded in agreement. He, too, had had ample experience of the ways of assault and sudden, violent death. ‘That wound may not have struck him dead on the instant. Mortal though it was, he could have had time to turn and start fighting. I’ve seen men with three wounds worse than that carry on swinging a sword for five minutes before falling to the ground.’

John looked up at the reeve. ‘No pouch or wallet, was there? Nothing about him to say who he was?’

Ralph shook his head dolefully. ‘If they were robbers, they’d have taken anything of value. He has no ring, no brooch.’

The coroner shrugged and turned away. ‘Clerk, earn your keep by writing all this in your roll. Make a note of all his clothing, exactly as to nature and colour. His age - would you say about twenty-five or somewhat older? His eyes look brown, though it’s hard to tell when they’ve been clouded in death as long as this. Hair is very pale, though that’s common enough around here.’ He was still staring at the corpse, his lips pursed thoughtfully. ‘How long would you reckon he’s been dead, Gwyn?’

His henchman pursed his own lips and considered for a while. He was no man for rash judgements.

‘November? This weather, wet but not cold. At least a week, probably a few days longer.’

The coroner nodded: that fitted with his own estimate.

‘Yes - no maggots, but it’s late in the season.’

Gwyn pointed down at the body. ‘He’s also got that.’

It was a large brown mole, low down on the right side of the neck, from which a cluster of long hairs stuck out. ‘Some one may know it - it’s obvious enough.’

Crowner John nodded. ‘He was born with that, so his family would know of it - if we ever find them.

Add it to your roll, clerk.’

While Thomas pulled out his quill, ink-vial, a roll of sheep parchment and sought a flat-topped sack for a desk, Gwyn looked at the stout shoes still worn by the dead man. He bent down again and felt the heels with a finger. ‘He had a horse, that’s for sure. There are marks of prick-spurs rubbed into the leather.’

John pursed his lips. ‘Good clothing and owned a horse. Not a common peasant. Should make him easier to trace, if he’s a man of better birth. So long as he’s from these parts.’

‘And so long as he’s not a Frenchman, as you suggested from his garments,’ put in the clerk, now busy with his quill.

The inquest was to be held that afternoon, in the barn in which the body lay.

As putrefaction was worsening rapidly, Crowner John decided that there was no point in going back to Exeter only to return the next day. They would give themselves miles of weary riding and allow the corpse to get more foul by the hour. ‘Summon a jury by noon - and your priest. We’ll get the poor fellow buried before evening,’ he commanded the reeve.

‘Every man and boy over twelve years old, mind you, from the four nearest villages,’ yapped his clerk, officiously latching himself on to the power of the coroner.

Ralph stared at them with a return of his former truculence. ‘I can’t do that! Many will be working the fields, cutting wood, tending sheep and cattle, some far from the villages up on the moor.’

Thomas de Peyne waved his arms at the village headman. ‘Do as you’re told, man. The law says every male in the Hundred has to come forward and see the corpse, then stand as juryman.’

The reeve stuck sullenly to his objections. “Tisn’t possible, sirs. I couldn’t even get word by midday to everyone from this village, let alone the Hundred. And who’s to tend the animals, work the mill? The sheep will have roamed half-way to Exmoor while folk are here gawping at the corpse.’

As the little clerk was about to continue his ranting, John put out a large hand to push him aside. ‘Do your best, reeve. Just get as many men as you can in the time. The pig boy, the first finders, anyone who knows anything about how the body was first seen. And get someone to dig a fresh grave in the churchyard. He’ll have to go in unnamed, but at least you can get your priest to read a few words over him.’

Ralph ambled off, relieved that the big man was not going to apply every letter of the disruptive new law.

Gwyn pushed the barn door closed and they strode off through the mud, back to the reeve’s house.

‘We may as well dry off properly around his miserable fire while we wait,’ muttered the coroner, squinting up at the low clouds draped over the moors above. It had stopped raining for the moment, but the threat hovered over them.

The silent wife produced more soup and bread, and they slowly steamed dry by the hearth, now brightened a little with a few new logs. Afterwards, like the old campaigner he was, Gwyn of Polruan wrapped himself in his cloak and stretched out his massive frame on the hard-packed floor. He never missed the chance to eat, rest or relieve himself, on the principle that he never knew when the next opportunity might come along.

The coroner gave more instructions to his new and not very cherished clerk. ‘Get all this down on your rolls without fail. The reeve’s name, names of the first finders and anyone else who has anything useful to say.

And a note that the village is to be amerced, whatever transpires at the inquest.’

‘Why should that be, then? grunted Gwyn from the floor, not yet asleep.

‘Because the dead man’s not been presented as English by the village. Nor can he be, as they don’t know him from Adam - and he looks every inch a Norman gentleman.’

Even though it was almost a hundred and thirty years since the Norman invasion, the assumption was still made that anyone found dead of foul play was a Norman killed by Saxons.

‘Will they have to pay for that, then?’ demanded Gwyn.

‘Depends on what the King’s justices decide. If we find the real killer, then the villager’s fault is transferred to him. If not, I dare say they’ll be made to pay up.’

Gwyn sniffed loudly in disapproval. He thought this new coroner system merely another way to screw money out of the poor for the royal Treasury. Only his dogged loyalty to his knight made him keep his criticisms to himself, but the occasional grunt and sniff gave vent to his Cornish independence.

John de Wolfe was well aware of his henchman’s feelings, but chose to ignore them. ‘At least the village did the right thing in sending for me straight away especially as I suspect they were right in thinking that the next village planted the body on them,’ he said.

‘Anyway, put it all down in that fair priest’s hand of yours, Thomas. It will have to be presented to the justices in the Eyre when they next come to Devon.’

Gwyn sniffed again. ‘Whenever that may be. They took five years to get to Bodmin last time.’

The bandy little clerk couldn’t resist a quick jibe at his enemy. ‘That’s because Cornwall’s so far from civilisation. A peninsula full of hairy Celtic savages.’

Gwyn threw a dead coal from the nearby hearth with unerring aim, hitting Peyne on the side of the head.

The bird-faced ex-cleric let out a screech of anguish.

‘Stop it, you two!’ snapped John. ‘You’re like a pair of damned children, not grown men.’ He slumped on his stool, hunching over the fire, steam rising faintly from his leather jerkin.

Tranquillity reigned for a time and when the coroner and his officer were sleepily silent, Thomas de Peyne sat with his back to the wall, huddled in his worn cloak. He thought again of the coroner’s threat to sack him if he couldn’t stomach the job, even though he had the Archdeacon’s patronage. A fear of impending unhappiness seemed to be his lot: for almost two months now he had been almost content, with at least some purpose in life and a few pence from the coroner’s purse to cover his minuscule needs.

Common sense told him that Sir John’s threat had been only half meant, but Thomas’s insecurity dogged his every waking hour. As he crouched on the damp earth floor, his crooked back against the rough wall, he mulled over his own unhappy history. He was not a devout man, in spite of his former vocation, but he believed in God and trusted that, when he died, his next incarnation would be a damned sight better than the present one.

The fourth son of a minor Hampshire knight, there had been no land for him in their small honour near Eastleigh, so at the age of twelve he had been put into the cathedral school at Winchester. The entrance of such an unprepossessing lad, the runt of the litter, into such a prestigious college had been eased by his father’s cousin John de Alecon, now Archdeacon of Exeter but who had then been one of the prebendaries of Winchester Cathedral. As he sat nursing his knees under his thin cloak, Thomas reflected on the years he had spent at school, never seeing his home for a full five years. As a small child, he had suffered a cold abscess of his upper spine, contracted from the phthisis that affected his mother and which had killed one of his older brothers. Though his had eventually healed, it had left him slightly stooped and twisted, the object of ridicule by his schoolfellows. Yet he had survived and had been strengthened in resolve by his persecution. He excelled at his letters, perhaps as compensation for his physical disadvantage. He could soon read and speak Latin and Norman French, as well as native English, which was looked on with scorn by his aristocratic Norman contemporaries even King Richard had never bothered to learn a word of English. His penmanship earned even the grudging praise of his strict monkish tutors, but with these narrow talents, only one course was open to him - to go into the Church. Thomas de Peyne had no particular interest in theology, liturgy or pastoral care, but had a strong liking for books and manuscripts, and an insatiable curiosity about other people’s business probably because his own was so dull.

In due course and after years of study of logic, mathematics and more Latin, he became a junior deacon at Winchester. Gradually, over the next decade, he had become a workhorse in the administration of the cathedral and chapter. He was employed mainly in the treasury, his participation in religious life minimal, confined to obligatory attendance of the several daily services - but he had also become a teacher of reading and writing, which had helped towards his eventual downfall.

On his elevation to Archdeacon John de Alecon had moved to Exeter eight years ago, and was now one of the right-hand men of the Bishop. Before he left Winchester, his valedictory act for Thomas had been to get him ordained. Soon afterwards, he was made prebendary of one of the smallest parishes on the outskirts of the city, although he still laboured as a cathedral administrator and schoolmaster.

Thomas’s reminiscences were halted briefly by a shattering snore from Gwyn, which disturbed the Cornishman sufficiently to make him mutter and grunt, then turn over and go back to sleep. Crowner John seemed to be dozing quietly on his stool, and the clerk’s thoughts drifted back for the thousandth time to the events of his fall from grace.